Sometimes we’d explore.
My mother and her children walked in a line through the neighborhood, a ragtag group of boys and girls, arranged by descending height. We’d crisscross the streets in the northeast section of the city, resting along the way until we found ourselves on the sloping green hill near the softball field on East Main and Culver. Six kids, grubby-fingered and pushing through the slippery pile of books fished out from the twin Dumpsters that stood like sentries outside the high school. So many gloss-covered books were discarded that they slopped over the tops of the Dumpsters and fell into our hands.
“Who would throw these away?” My mother’s eyes grew with the prospect of all those words.
She pushed her red-brown hair into a knot at the back of her neck, sat on the grass, and entered a book so softly that we barely spoke. She only answered after we asked twice if it was okay to chew on purple-headed clover.
It was warm, with a breeze, and we watched as three Vietnamese men pulled June bugs from the small trees lining the sidewalk. They pulled the bugs from the air, flattened the shells between finger and thumb, then tossed them into the plastic buckets they carried.
“They’ll eat those bugs,” someone said, and we laughed and chewed the nectar from clover.
We lounged, spread out on the grass until the sun lowered and our skin cooled. Even then, we didn’t want to let go of the day and tried lugging armfuls of the books home. In the end, there were not enough hands and arms to carry all those books away. But the want was there.